Mr. Rogers translated the Memoirs of Jahāngīr several years ago from the edition which Sayyid Aḥmad printed at Ghazipur in 1863 and at Allyghur in 1864. Orientalists are greatly indebted to the Sayyid for his disinterested labours, but his text seems to have been made from a single and defective MS. and is often incorrect, especially in the case of proper names. I have collated it with the excellent MSS. in the India Office and the British Museum, and have thus been able to make numerous corrections. I have also consulted the MS. in the Library of the R.A.S., but it is not a good one. I have, with Mr. Rogers’s permission, revised the translation, and I have added many notes.
There is an account of the Memoirs in the sixth volume of Elliot & Dowson’s “History of India,” and there the subject of the various recensions is discussed. There is also a valuable note by Dr. Rieu in his “Catalogue of Persian MSS.,” i, 253. It is there pointed out that there is a manuscript translation of the first nine years of the Memoirs by William Erskine in the British Museum. I have consulted this translation and found it helpful. The MS. is numbered Add. 26,611. The translation is, of course, excellent, and it was made from a good MS.
A translation of what Dr. Rieu calls the garbled Memoirs of Jahāngīr was made by Major David Price and published by the Oriental Translation Committee of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1829. The author of this work is unknown, and its history is an unsolved problem. It is occasionally fuller than the genuine Memoirs, and it contains some picturesque touches, such as the account of Akbar’s deathbed. But it is certain that it is, in part at least, a fabrication, and that it contains statements which Jahāngīr could never have made. Compare, for instance, the account of the death of Sohrāb, the son of Mīrzā Rustam, near the end of Price’s translation, pp. 138–9, with that given in the genuine Memoirs in the narrative of the fifteenth year of the reign, p. 293, and also in the Iqbāl-nāma, p. 139. Besides being inaccurate, the garbled or spurious Memoirs are much shorter than the genuine work, and do not go beyond the fifteenth year. Price’s translation, too, was made from a single and badly written MS.[1] which is now in the R.A.S. library. Dr. Rieu remarks that it is to be regretted that so poor a fabrication as the garbled Memoirs should have been given to the world as a genuine production of Jahāngīr. This being so, it is appropriate that the present translation of the genuine Memoirs should be published by the Royal Asiatic Society.
When Jahāngīr had written his Memoirs for the first twelve years of his reign he made them into a volume, and had a number of copies made and distributed (Elliot, vi, 360). The first of these he gave to S͟hāh Jahān, who was then in high favour. The present publication is a translation of the first volume of the Memoirs, but the translation of the whole Memoirs, together with the additions of Muʿtamad K͟hān and Muḥammad Hādī, has been completed, and it is to be hoped that its publication will follow in due course.
Jahāngīr reigned for twenty-two years, but ill-health and sorrow made him give up the writing of his Memoirs in the seventeenth year of his reign (see Elliot, vi, 280). He then entrusted the task to Muʿtamad K͟hān, the author of the Iqbāl-nāma, who continued the Memoirs to the beginning of the nineteenth year. He then dropped writing the Memoirs in the name of the emperor, but he continued the narrative of the reign, to Jahāngīr’s death, in his own work, the Iqbāl-nāma. Muḥammad Hādī afterwards continued the Memoirs down to Jahāngīr’s death, but his work is little more than an abridgment of the Iqbāl-nāma. Sayyid Aḥmad’s edition contains the continuations of the Memoirs by Muʿtamad and Muḥammad Hādī, and also Muḥammad Hādī’s preface and introduction. But this preface and introduction have not been translated by Mr. Rogers, and I do not think that a translation is necessary. Muḥammad Hādī is a late writer (see Elliot, vi, 392), his date being the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and his introduction seems to be almost wholly derived from the Maʾās̤ir-i-Jahāngīrī of Kāmgār Ḥusainī (Elliot, vi, 257). It consists mainly of an account of Jahāngīr’s life from his birth up to his accession.
It is perhaps unnecessary to say anything about the importance of Jahāngīr’s Memoirs. They give a lively picture of India in the early decades of the seventeenth century, and are a valuable supplement to the Akbar-nāma. I may be allowed, however, to end this preface with the following remarks which I contributed to the Indian Magazine for May, 1907:—
“The Royal authors of the East had more blood in them than those kings whose works have been catalogued by Horace Walpole. To find a parallel to them we must go back to Julius Cæsar, and even then the advantage is not upon the side of Europe. After all, the commentaries of the famous Roman are a little disappointing, and certainly the Memoirs of Bābar and Jahāngīr are far more human and fuller of matter than the story of the Gallic Wars. All Muhammadans have a fancy for writing chronicles and autobiographies, and several Muhammadan kings have yielded to the common impulse. Central Asia has given us the Memoirs of Tamarlane, Bābar, and Ḥaidar, and the chronicle of Abu-l-ghazi; Persia has given us the Memoirs of Shah Tahmasp, and India the Memoirs of the Princess Gulbadan and Jahāngīr. In modern times we see the same impulse at work, for we have the biography of the late Ameer of Afghanistan and the diary of the Shah of Persia.
“The contributions to literature by Royal authors which come to us from the East form a department by themselves, and one which is of great value. Nearly all Eastern histories are disfigured by adulation. Even when the author has had no special reason for flattery and for suppression of truth, he has been dazzled by the greatness of his subject, and gives us a picture which no more reveals the real king than does a telescope the real constitution of the Morning Star. But when Eastern monarchs give us chronicles, the case is different. They have no occasion for fear or favour, and mercilessly expose the failings of their contemporaries. Not that they are to be trusted any more than other Orientals when speaking of themselves. Bābar has suppressed the story of his vassalage to Shah Ismaʿīl, of his defeat at Ghajdawān, and his treatment of ʿĀlam Lodi; and Jahāngīr has glossed over his rebellion against his father, and the circumstances of Shīr-āfgan’s death. But when they have to speak of others—whether kings or nobles—they give us the whole truth, and perhaps a little more. An amiable Princess like Gulbadan Begam may veil the faults and weaknesses of her brothers Humāyūn and Hindāl; but Bābar strips the gilt off nearly every one whom he mentions, and spares no one—not even his own father.
“The Memoirs of Bābar, Ḥaidar, and Gulbadan have been translated into English, and those of T̤ahmasp have been translated into German; but unfortunately Jahāngīr’s have never been fully translated,[2] though there are extracts in Elliot & Dowson’s History, and Major Price many years ago gave us from an imperfect manuscript a garbled account of a few years of his Memoirs. Yet in reality Jahāngīr’s Memoirs are not inferior in interest to those of Bābar. Indeed, we may go further and say there is twice as much matter in them as in Bābar’s Memoirs, and that they are by far the most entertaining of the two works. Not that Jahāngīr was by any means as remarkable a man as his great-grandfather. He was a most faulty human being, and his own account of himself often excites our disgust and contempt. But he had the sense not to confine his narrative to an account of himself, and he has given us a picture of his father, the great Akbar, which is a bigger ‘plum’ than anything in Bābar’s Memoirs. But his account of himself has also its charm, for it reveals the real man, and so he lives for us in his Memoirs just as James VI—to whom, and to the Emperor Claudius, he bears a strange and even ludicrous resemblance—lives in the ‘Fortunes of Nigel’ or Claudius in Suetonius and Tacitus. Jahāngīr was indeed a strange mixture. The man who could stand by and see men flayed alive, and who, as he himself tells us, put one man to death and had two others hamstrung because they showed themselves inopportunely and frightened away his game, could yet be a lover of justice and could spend his Thursday evenings in holding high converse. He could quote Fīrdūsi’s verse against cruelty to animals—
‘Ah! spare yon emmet, rich in hoarded grain—